Start naming names!!

Following up on my previous post, I know that the mods on Dave’s strongly discourage name-dropping in a negative light since a lot of recruiters are their customers (understandable). But feel free to do it here!

Anyone been legitimately screwed over by a not-so-professional recruiter or agency? List their name here so that other applicants can avoid them.

However, let’s not play the same shady games that they do and ensure that your experiences are accurate.

10 Responses

Eugene Kang of Dodaedu sent me threats to “Watch your fucking back” last Summer as my labour case against him and Kim Bo Mi of English Junior Lab was in the works. Huh, the Kangaroo Court in Incheon City made me use him as my Interpreter-Translator as well. So much for the judges being impartial!

Steven Grommesh, a Korean-Adoptee, had to go to court with me for, amongst other things, threatening to kill me because I asked for my stolen Degree, Passport, and other work visa-related docs be returned to me too many times. He is a known member of The Last Generation Korean Killers Gang in the U.S. and even said in front of the judges that he was going to kill me. He works for ENI Education near Sadang Station in Seoul.

Jack Lee – Yi Yeung Sup – is a Korean-Canadian who owes me more than 2 million won. He’s runs the GS 25 store in the basement of the Yangjae Cultural Centre of Seoul and is the C.E.O. of In the World. Ltd., which runs after-school Programmes and the Ansan English Village. He’s either 43 or 44 years old and has a residence in Cheonan City. His wife is equally scummy and corrupt.

Eugene Kang – I think I saw that name in one of my seraches. I will double check, I will also make a follow-up call to make sure stuff is being processed. Any Canadians out there, do you have any sexual predator lists that are on the internet? Please post. Matter of fact any nationality that has an online predator database, please post.

I realise this post will sound really petty, and is no way near as bad as the above post, but just for pure cheek, I would avoid Flying Cows.

We were signed up to them for 3-4 months while my partner and I collected our docs. At the time we let them know they were the only agency we were using (naively!!) and we were going to just wait for a job with them because we trusted them and had a good rapport with them.

Once we obtained all our docs, we sent them an email asking what our realistic chances were of getting a job before Christmas (because of the market etc) and then didn’t reply. We sent it again in case they didn’t get the first one and we then got a response saying “I sense deja vu here, you’ve already sent me this email. You should email someone else in the company about it.”

I just thought this was pathetic, why take the time to create that petty response when they could have a) answered the question honestly or b) forwarded it themselves or c) ignored it or d) lied. At least if they had ignored it, we wouldn’t have such a low opinion of them. It was just childish.

So we signed up to several other agencies and now have a job. Like I said, I realise that we were not “screwed over” by them or anything, but I am just giving my 2 cents. We realise they probably get lots of emails a day asking the same thing, so why not just ignore ours? I just feel that in a competitive environment like recruiting, where there are so many other recruiters/companies, Flying Cows shouldn’t have sent such a childish reply because ultimately, we chose another agency over them and they lost 2 recruiter fees.

Yes, that was a childish reply; they could have simply replied back and said that they’re working on positions. That would have been better than simply ignoring it as well. Seems like some of these people are just giving up on their jobs/lives.

I am the founder of Flying Cows and I’d just like to say that this in no way reflects the manner in which we normally work. I can only think that this must have been the response of a non-permanent member of staff. I would like to personally apologise for this and let you now that we are taking this very seriously.

I set up Flying Cows almost seven years ago. After having taught in Korea for four years I was acutely aware that there was a need for a decent recruiter in the industry who was interested in more than collecting a recruitment fee.

I was both surprised and disappointed to read this post and I hope you will accept our apology.

Strange. I had a really good experience with Flying Cows. I wouldn’t recommend teach-koreans.com. Absolutely useless. More concerned with supplementing his income occasionally rather than actually working as a recruiter.

Oh, also, Aclipse. Incredibly unprofessional. Spoke with me via email a few times and made it seem like that they had jobs available in the very near future. Turns out, after they had rang me, that they didn’t have anything until after the new year (this was a little over 4 months ago (possibly even 5 months)). Without checking my emails, I seemed to recall them saying that it would be February before they actually had jobs. In terms of the time it takes to process everything, that’s not the near future at all.

To balance it out again, Adventure Teaching were absolutely bloody fantastic. Prompt responses and seemed like they were doing their best for me at all times. Even sent me an email to wish me luck when I had managed to secure a job myself.

I have to say I wasn’t impressed with Flying Cows. Everything was great, helpfulness in getting visa docs together etc, but in their haste to get me to accept the first job I was offered, they insisted that the school was ‘just 15 mins from central Seoul’ (I had asked to be in or near to Central Seoul). When I accepted and went over there it turned out the school was 25 miles outside of central Seoul and took an hour and a half to get to Seoul by a bus and a train. Hardly what could be described as ‘in or near Central Seoul’. Rather I was stuck in a one horse town mountain village with nothing going on and consequently had a relatively dull and lonely experience. I would no way have accepted this job if I had known. When I emailed and complained about this I received the rather pathetic excuse ‘Only Americans can get jobs in central Seoul because they are preferred for their accent. Brits have to settle for the less happening areas’ This is a complete load of BS because even Philipinos (non native speakers) can be found working in Hagwons in central Seoul .

I advise anyone going through Flying Cows or any other recruiter for that matter to check locations of jobs VERY carefully. In fact I would advise people not to use recruiters at all if they know the country, you’ll get a better job with better salary (yes thats right where do you think the recruiters commission comes from? your salary – even if the recruiter insists this isn’t the case like Flying Cows did).